The Stray Rover on the Far Side of Mars

PASADENA, Calif. — Hanging over the stage at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium was a giant illustration of NASA’s Opportunity rover, its name blasted in big, celebratory block letters. It was supposed to be an event solely focused on the rover, which just hit its 10-year anniversary on Mars, a feat considering it was only slated to drive for 90 days.

The speakers, most of whom worked on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) team, were given one directive: share your best stories of “Oppy,” as it’s lovingly nicknamed.

But objectives be damned, this team was going to talk about another rover first.

Ask anyone who has worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for more than five years which rover is their favorite, and you’ll get the same response every time.

“Spirit,” they’ll say wistfully as a grin inches its way across even the most serious of cheeks. They’ll look at the floor or into the space past your shoulder, and their eyes will glaze over with nostalgia as they tell their version of the story about an underdog.

Steve Squyres, who heads the MER mission, calls Spirit “the blue-collar rover.” Driver Ashley Stroupe says the rover is like “the big sister” who goes through a lot of crap to make things easier for her little sister. And despite being the principal scientist on the Curiosity mission, John Grotzinger still refers to Spirit as “everyone's rover.”

Everyone at JPL uses “her” to describe all the rovers — because, they say, these robots are on a voyage, like a ship, and ships are always female — but it feels more personal when they humanize Spirit. Though Opportunity's story is longer, Spirit's reads like the great American novel.

Spirit landed on Mars on Jan. 3, 2004, a few weeks before her twin sister Oppy. The plan, basically, was to fling the rover in the general direction where they wanted to land. A bubble of airbags would deploy, and Spirit would hit the ground like a bouncy ball and roll until she finally came to a stop.

But Spirit’s saga began before she even made it to Mars. Three days before her landing, engineers had to scramble to fix a software glitch that would have prevented one of her airbags from opening, leaving Spirit naked as she plummeted toward the planet at 200 miles per hour.

So the team had to manually fire the airbag just hours before the descent, making an already risky stunt even more so. All the team could do was watch as Spirit attempted what ended up being a rather sloppy landing on another planet more than 3 million miles away from mission control in Pasadena, Calif.

When the puffy padding finally unfurled to reveal an intact rover, Spirit’s makers, their faces wet with tears, erupted with joy. The whole team then stormed the press conference, throwing open the doors, rushing in and chanting in unison. Sean O'Keefe, who was NASA’s administrator at the time, popped open a bottle of champagne.

Principal Investigator Steve Squyres reacts in the control room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as they receive a signal from the Mars Rover Spirit after it landed on Jan. 3, 2004.

Image: Los Angeles Times, Wally Skalij/Associated Press

“There was a lot of alcohol, which was breaking the rules, but it was kind of like ‘who cares?’” John Beck, NASA’s former resident filmmaker, told me. “Everybody was having a big party, and that was cool. That was Spirit.”

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe (in red) and Dr. Charles Elachi, JPL Director, embrace while looking at the first images arriving from Mars after the landing of the rover Spirit on Jan. 3, 2004.

Image: Bill Ingalls-NASA/Associated Press

Spirit’s dramatic landing was a fitting prelude to her mission. She would later suffer a broken wheel, numerous blackouts, survive a planet-wide dust storm and face unforgiving Martian winters.

If Curiosity is the Hummer of rovers, Spirit was the Honda. Like Oppy, she was a budget rover made for a 90-day mission. But let’s not forget that the Honda will still start even after you’ve driven it 200,000 miles and forgotten a few oil changes. Spirit drove for more than six years.

And like a well-made, reasonably priced compact car, Spirit did more than her drivers thought she could.

After her shot-in-the-dark landing, Spirit looked up to see a mountain range 1.6 miles in the distance. When she beamed back those images to Earth, the MER team knew they’d make the trip, and it would take way more than 90 days.

When Squyres took the stage at Caltech on Jan. 16, he opened with Spirit's ultimate story of triumph: Six months after landing she became the first robot to climb a mountain on another planet when she scaled Husband Hill. Standing about the same height as the Statue of Liberty, she looked out onto a sweeping view of the rusty valley, snapped her camera and delivered one of the most iconic images of the Red Planet.

In late 2005 while descending Husband Hill, Spirit took this panorama.

Image: NASA/JPL/Cornell

Was there ever life on Mars? If we ever can definitively answer the question, we’ll owe it all to Spirit because she found water. She first discovered clues indicating water during her ascent of Husband Hill. However, her biggest find wouldn’t be uncovered until years later.

As Martian winter approached in 2005, and Spirit made her retreat to lower elevations, she collected data from an area called Comanche. But dust blinded the rover, and it wasn’t until five years later that the MER team was able to analyze the results, which revealed the first evidence that neutral, potentially life-sustaining water had once flowed. Today those findings are considered one of the biggest discoveries we’ve made on Mars.

Even Spirit’s flaws ended up working to her advantage. For much of her life, Spirit dragged a broken wheel behind her, slowing down drives and causing headaches for the engineers on Earth. She would get stuck in soft dirt, and that wheel would spin, digging holes.

"But there was a marvelous silver lining to this cloud," Squyres said. "It dug this trench as we drove, and every so often, something terrific would pop up on the floor of this trench."

When this happened on a ridgeline of Husband Hill, Spirit inadvertently dug in just the right place and uncovered a bright material that turned out to be more than 90% hydrated silica, which is similar to an opal gemstone. This deposit showed researchers that Mars was once a place where hydrothermal systems, or hotsprings, form — another indication that Mars was once hospitable for life.

The MER team lost contact with Spirit in March 2010 and tried for months to reestablish a connection, sending more than 1,300 commands. But that took manpower, and that costs money. When the higher-ups at NASA took notice, they shut it down, killing hope of hearing from everyone’s favorite rover again.

If you spend enough time with some JPLers, you’ll hear whisperings about what could have happened had NASA let them keep trying and politics hadn’t come into play.

However, most people who work on rover missions don’t like to talk about Spirit’s death at all. And if you want to avoid angry glares, don’t ever bring up that xkcd comic — “It’s too close to home,” they once told me.

In total, the slow-moving Spirit clocked 4.8 miles on her odometer. While it's seemingly paltry compared to Oppy's 24 miles, Spirit made the most of those steps, jam-packing more science than we ever thought she could handle. (Oppy is still doing science and returning cool things.)

As Opportunity celebrates 10 years today, Spirit remains silent, trapped in sand at her resting place. But we can only hope her heart is still beating, waiting for her astronaut to come.

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